A dream of a more tolerant Canada

Re Manitoulin’s brawl to arms, Oct. 14

I appreciate the Star’s efforts to champion Indigenous issues over the years in the face of political neglect and popular indifference. Your article on the Manitoulin Island school violence explored deep issues that have existed there throughout our lifetime. Racial intolerance is not an issue Canadians like to discuss, especially when we are the culprits.

For several years during my childhood, I had the privilege of living on Manitoulin, that most idyllic of islands.

As a middle-class white child, I lived in a privileged society. Coming to school, Indigenous students often travelled for an hour or more on a bus, sometimes a ferry as well, to white communities where white teachers taught a white curriculum, exclusively in English, to prepare them to write departmental exams that showed no reflection of their heritage. Very few Indigenous students ever graduated from Grade 13. How could it be otherwise?

Had the roles been reversed, how would I have done in departmental exams that failed to acknowledge my heritage, and were written exclusively in Ojibwe?

Those people who spoke to the Manitoulin Expositor about the good old days were undoubtedly part of the entitled white community. This dysfunctional relationship was not the dream of Confederation, which was to celebrate and enjoin our three founding nations.

Manitoulin Island’s cultural divide is not unique or even different from the problems existing in other parts of the country where our cultures live in close proximity.

Confederation’s dream was that we could grow together as a society, through mutual sharing and respect. Instead, the powerful white community used a combination of the law of the land and our own self-serving insistence on our inherent goodness and generosity to plunder Indigenous communities.

True reconciliation is not one that says at the outset, “A pipeline will be built regardless of Indigenous opposition.” Nor is it one that says, in Canada, we have no cultural war raging inside our doors, to paraphrase Peter, Paul and Mary.

If Canada is ever to live the dream envisioned by Confederation, those of us who came of age in the 1960s must remember that once we dreamed of a better, cleaner, safer, more tolerant and inclusive world. Frank Smith, Woodville, Ont.